Peter Doolittle talk on "working memory".

Working memory is the part of our consciousness that we are aware of.
1. Allows us to store immediate experiences and a little bit of knowledge
2. Allows us to reach into our long term memory and use it to achieve our current goal

We can remember about 4 things in Working Memory. It has a very limited capacity and we'll forget those things very quickly, seconds, unless we do something with them. We need to process them as they happens.

Working memory Capacity has a long history and is related to some positive effects. People that have relatively high Working memory capacity tend to be good story tellers and tend to be able to reason at high levels.

We need to use Working Memory efficiently to handle the stream of life that comes at us to make sense of it and to achieve our goals. Working memory is really quite small and this talk sheds some light on this interesting architecture. That's how I view it - as an architecture. I think the RAM, cache, disk storage solution in computing is a kind of metaphor for this. But, did our understanding of computer architecture allow us to pin this solution on our mind when actually we are just approximating the solution. Anyway, it's a nice talk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_doolittle_how_your_working_memory_makes_sense_of_the_world.html